Malaysia denies entry to critical journalist

New York, July 5, 2013--Malaysian immigration authorities should
reverse their decision to deny entry Wednesday to a journalist critical of the
provincial Sarawak government, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.
Clare Rewcastle Brown, who is based in the United Kingdom, flew to Kuching in
southeast Malaysia but was served
a "notice of refusal of entry" and later put on a flight to Singapore,
according to news
reports.

Brown is the founder of Sarawak
Report and Radio Free Sarawak, two news
outlets that have accused the local and national governments of environmental
and political misconduct in the state of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo. Sarawak
Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud is closely
aligned with the Barisan Nasional (National Front) coalition that has ruled
Malaysia for 56 years. In a video interview in
Kuching's airport, posted to YouTube by independent news website Malaysiakini, Brown said a powerful
local political figure and a transnational corporation, neither of which she
named, have sued her locally for defamation.

In April, the news portal Sarawak Report and the website for Radio Free Sarawak came under
relentless denial-of-service (DOS) attack,
staffers had told CPJ. A DOS attack prevents a website from functioning
normally by overloading its host server with external communications requests.
The sites were two of several news portals targeted
prior to May's general
elections, which are still being contested
in the courts and with street
demonstrations. Barisan Nasional clung
to power despite losing the popular vote.

"The action taken against Clare Brown and the attacks on the
news organizations she runs are symptomatic of a broader problem in Malaysia,"
CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Bob Dietz said. "Since independence in 1957, the
country has never fully emerged as a democracy with a free media."

In
April 2011, cyberattacks against Sarawak
Report and several other websites preceded important elections in Sarawak. Brown's
sites operate out of London to avoid Malaysian censorship. She has received
anonymous death threats in the past, according to news reports.

For more data and analysis on Malaysia, visit CPJ's Malaysia
page here.